runcible spoon

Where DO nuns get their necessities?

For a while, I was intrigued by those meta-crawlers that allow you to see what sort of search terms are being plugged into the Net second-by-second. Voyeuristically fascinating.

Now I have something better: the Character & Plot Realism Q&A over at NaNoWriMo.

This stuff is like crack.

I kid you not: there are folks over there asking questions like 'Where do nuns get their daily necessities?', 'What's a concussion feel like?', 'What does a dead animal smell of?' and 'How can I  realistically depict a sea-based society of women?'

They get the goods in response, too. There's a whole lotta people in this world who've either been concussed, smelt rotting whales, or know how nuns go about their business - and they want to share that knowledge. Fantastic!

One response to the dead animal question really sums it up, somehow. CM suggests:

If anyone sees you sniffing the dead dog on the side of the road just say, "It's okay, I'm a writer!"

Monday already

The Internet is a wicked, wicked thing. An enabler to the inner procrastinator.  It's better than TV somehow: it sort of papers over your laziness and lulls you into thinking, 'No, no. I'm really doing something here!' 

Sprawled on the couch watching Donald Trump's toupee-like noggin jigging about on The Apprentice, it's harder to kid yourself that this is productive time.

They do things different in tha South

Tantilising photo from post entitled Brunetti: Hot Chocolate I Have Known at Diversionary Daily, a Perth-based blog.

Ever so slightly hyperventilating right now. Must. Go. To. Melbourne. Immediately.

Need to lie down.

Kopitiam

Last night's Asia Book Club was stomach-pleasingly good.  We had read (or, in many cases, almost finished reading) Secret Histories: Finding George Orwell in a Burmese Teashop, by Emma Larkin. The author's real name is not actually Larkin - she has used a pseudonym in order that she not incriminate the many writers, intellectuals and everyday dissents with whom she spoke in Burma.

I thought Secret Histories was fascinating, as well as very nicely written. It was a notch above many similar books by other Westerners in that Larkin is fluent in Burmese and was herself born and raised in Asia. She currently lives in Bangkok.

Of course, my passion may also have been ignited by Larkin's many (and, some might say, reverential) descriptions of Burmese tea houses:

There is a pleasing rythm to the life of the Mandalay tea shops, and whole days can be lost inside them.  In the morning, bicycles and motorbikes crowd around them in congested rows as customers down their first cup of the day before going to work.  At lunchtime, the peak of the day's heat, the tea shops are lazy and quiet; the young waiting boys doze on the tables, while flies hover above them in sultry slow motion. In the late afternoon and early evenings the pace picks up as the boys become busy with orders for tea and snacks, and the shops are again noisy with chatter.

Mmm. Said tea is 'served honey-thick with condensed milk, and washed down with Oolong tea' as a chaser.

In light of all this, it is unsurprising to note that I fell in love with Kopitiam, the Malaysian hawker-style coffee shop where we found ourselves meeting to discuss the book. The atmosphere was just the way I like my small-time Asian eateries: poky, basic, bare-bones and cosy. A couple of golden lucky cats waved their open paws at us from high shelves and an industrial-strength airconditioner was blowing a refreshing gale. The little restaurant quickly became packed out with local Asian students schlepping in in shorts and rubber sandals to grab a fast, easy evening meal.

The char kway teow (hawker-style noodles) were fantastic, and the nasi lemak a real stand-out - the rice and potato/chicken curry being served on a plate studded with golden peanuts, fresh cucumber slices, hardboiled egg, sambal and tangy, pungent ikan bilis (like anchovies, but served dry and crispy). Please, Sir, may I have some more?

For afters, most of us sipped at steaming mugs of teh tarik - a Malaysian-style 'pulled tea' that is served frothy and sweet and suitably strong. It was without a doubt the best I have had outside of Penang. Just amazing.

Andrew, on the other hand, couldn't go past the Grass Jelly drink once he'd noticed it on the menu. The boy has an addiction. The drink had been misrendered as 'glass' jelly, but we decided that only added to the charm of the place.

Avoidance, procrastination, etc

About that Novel Writing Thing. Yeah, that one.

I'm going to do it.

50, 000 words. One month. One wedding (not mine). One pack-up-the-house-and-move (mine).

Oh my, I feel an attack of the vapours coming on already.

Seriously, it's phenomenally scary. It's amazing just how frightening  words on a page (or the fear of them not being on the page) can be.

Little scars and memories

Such small things keep jolting me.  Reminding me that this is not the only way to live. Reminding me that this person I call 'my self' spent a long time away from home, just out there, travelling.

The oddest thing happens when you come home: the gap just closes over. It's as though the time away never really happened. Like it got chucked down some Orwellian chute of forgetfulness.

It reminds me of the way the skin puckers and reddens at the edge of a cat scratch: every fibre of the body seeks to bridge that gap, to bring the two opposing edges together. The skin draws pale and tight once more. The tear is gone.

Still, a tiny scar tends to remain. A shadow-memory of that scratch. That's what the travel feels like right now. My life and all its demands - good and bad - has inexorably drawn closed over the memory of the year away, but a small scar still remains.

Mosquitos have been flocking lately.  The weather's getting warm, waking up the insect world.

The first one I saw made me flinch. It danced diseases in my mind: Malaria, Dengue. I worried and instantly rebuked myself for not wearing a long-sleeved shirt. Then I remembered - those diseases don't exist at home. I am not travelling any longer.

My mouth no longer shuts tight like a clamp in the shower, trying to keep out imagined dirty water, but I still start at times when I turn on a tap and think 'How is it that I can drink this stuff? What a crazy miracle to live somewhere where I can turn on the tap and put my mouth around a stream of cold, clean water.'

I miss the jangly bundle of keys I kept tied around my neck all that year. Each one fitted a different lock. I miss the utilitarian little wallet I carried slung about my body. It was unfashionable, green polyester, but it went everywhere with me from Cuba through to Japan.

The scar twitches from time to time. I can tell that trip will not be my last.

Qwerty is ruining my life

Why can I not type better? After all, I'm not of the age where one can simply roll one's eyes and sigh, 'oh well, it's all different for the young 'uns ... brought up on computers, they are.'

I AM pretty much a 'young one', for God's sake, but I still can't type!

I can vaguely recall lessons in early primary school using chunky, boxy Microbee computers on which we were supposed to learn to type. For some reason, that whole experience was a dismal failure on my part, and I was quite happy when the lessons petered out.

DISCLAIMER: when I see the rudimentary nature of said computer, I begin to think it's no longer appropriate to call myself 'young'.  I start to feel like I was born in the last Ice Age. This thing looks like it's only one step up from the days when a single computer required an entire room of its own:


 

Now I find myself grappling with the hunt-and-peck-at-top-speed dilemma: it's terrible ergonomically and brings with it an astounding rate of errors, but it remains faster than my paltry efforts at learning to touch type.

I know I need to force myself here, but the flesh (and the mind, for that matter) is weak. Every time I commence, I get dispirited and then before I know it, I'm pounding away with two fingers in a frenzied, mistake-addled keyboard dance.

Tomorrow is a new day. Maybe then ...

Keepin' bees

Sometimes something so, well, unexpected will do well on eBay.

It's not my auction, but I'd be damn happy if I were getting upwards of 30 bucks for that book. Intriguing.

Tastes like peanut butter (apparently)

One thing I truly dread at this time of year is the appearance of Bogong Moths. They used to be eaten by Aboriginal peoples who lived around Canberra. Their flavour is apparently 'quite nutty', although they are also extremely greasy and their bodies are quite scaly and unpleasant to the tongue if not prepared correctly.

I do not care for moths generally, but these ones really spook me. It's all about their dark, fuzzy bodies and their freaky wing markings.

Oh, and the fact that they are liable to fly right at you, getting entangled in your hair or clothes.

Because they are drawn off-course by the lights of big Australian cities, large numbers die without ever reaching their migratory destination. Their scraggly, battered bodies are a very potent symbol of late spring in Sydney.

At work yesterday, I was walking down the fire stairs when I noticed that the stairwell was littered with Bogong carcasses. The evil fluttery things had flown in there, become trapped, and subsequently died. This is pretty standard Bogong behaviour: in our apartment in the CBD, we hang our washing out on a line in the courtyard. The moths are at plague proportions in the city, attracted by the lights. When they spy our washing, with its nooks and crannies and dark folds of fabric, they clumsily scramble inside.

That means that getting the clothes in off the line is like participating in a re-make of Hitchcock's The Birds, only with moths: they flap and fly straight at you as you shake out the washing. Even worse are the ones that make it all the way inside, stowed securely in a cotton pullover or a T-shirt. There are few more disgusting feelings in this world than getting dressed only to feel a large insect struggling madly against your skin.

From one tea lover to another

I love tea with an obsessive fervour. I have been known to go into fancy-pants tea shops (like Tea2 in Sydney and Melbourne or T-bar in Adelaide and so on) and go a bit wild, splurging on a bazillion odd-sounding teas that I will, in all likelihood, never finish.

Nonetheless, the real key to my heart lies in garden-variety tea. Yep, a cuppa made with a teabag and finished off with a splash of milk. I do think that loose-leaf teas taste better, but convenience and laziness draw me back to the 'bag nine times out of ten.

And so, when I think about tea, it's in quite a workaday, knock-about sort of fashion. A cup of tea might be a daily ritual, but it's a very homely, don't-stand-on-ceremony sort of affair.

My mother and all four of my grandparents are also addicted. I suspect like most Australians who are similarly afflicted, it's a hangover from the English. I'm very attached to it. When I stay with people and I discover they're tea drinkers, it puts my heart at ease. It provides me a happy moment of "aha! my kind of people!"

I am smitten, then, with this website, NiceCupOfTeaaAndASitDown, run by Nicey and Wifey.  Being able to vote on biscuits is VERY cute - even if they are all UK ones, so half the time you have no idea what they're on about (in fact, some of the ones they mention sound downright lewd: Viennese Finger up your Coconut Ring, anybody? While Milk Chocolate Liebnitz, on the other hand, sounds quite the intellectual).